In this new edition of Omaha Sketchbook, Gregory Halpern returns to his lyrical
yet equivocal account of the American heartland. Compiled over fifteen years of
photographing Omaha, Nebraska, the book forms a prescient meditation on America,
the men and boys who inhabit it, and the mechanics of aggression, inadequacy,
and power. In loosely collaged spreads that reproduce his construction-paper
sketchbooks, Halpern takes pleasure in dissonance and unexpected harmony,
playing on a sense of simultaneous repulsion and attraction to the place.
Halpern has significantly altered the first iteration of the book with a new
cover and thirty-five previously unseen photographs, breathing life into his
original notion that this project is a working sketchbook he will return to and
revise periodically.
